Nokia’s studio flash-sync shows what the Lumia 1020 is capable of

By syncing its new camera phone with studio flash for a full-on professional portrait shoot, Nokia is out to prove that the Lumia 1020 is a true camera challenger

The new Nokia Lumia 1020 is out to stake a claim in the smartphone photography market, with its whopping 41-megapixel camera, and Nokia want you to know it.

Accordingly, they’ve released this video of their camera expert Ari Partinen and his colleague Marko Saari pulling off a full-scale studio shoot with the Lumia 1020, syncing the phone with studio flashes.

The video doesn’t tell us much, but fortunately the accompanying blog post on Nokia Conversations is a little more lucid.

The blog explains that Ari and Maario used soft box lights and external flashes to illuminate the models, and the manual settings the the Lumi 1020 itself to correctly expose the background.

It also tells us that the photographers used the Lumia 1020’s own Xenon flash as a trigger for the main studio flashes.

Ari explains:

“The flash on the Lumia 1020 has two short pulses. So we used a small external flash as a medium to disable the first pre-flash pulse coming from the Lumia 1020, and then fired the main external flashes only on the second pulse. This made sure the main flashes were synchronized perfectly with the moment we pressed the shutter key on the Lumia 1020.”

“We could have just used bright lights to illuminate the subject and not challenge ourselves with the flash synchronization. But for us, it was important we could capture the movement in the pictures and you can only really do that with a xenon flash.”

Nokia released a few images from the shoot, which you can see below. We’ve got our hands on the Lumia 1020 at this very moment so look out
for our review coming soon.